be still

these are some very grainy photos I have taken with the computer camera.

Yesterday marked three weeks since Leland's birth. There has been a marked silence here, and I apologize for that, though I imagine any one of you who has been in the throes of a baby's first days and weeks can attest that the simple act of finishing a cup of tea is impossible. Milking your goat becomes daunting. Closing the chickens in before dark is not in the cards. And writing a coherent blog post is a pipe dream.

My midwives told me, repeatedly, that the quickest route to recovery would start with 2 or 3 weeks of being still. I managed for 2 weeks to heed this advice. By the beginning of week three I was practically cross eyed with being still. I love my sweet babe, but I don't think its any secret that newborns are a bit boring. There are only so many hours I can spend lying on the couch while he sleeps for the 18th hour that day. When he's awake you couldn't pry me away from his sparkly eyes and his kicking feet. But when he's sleeping I'm most tempted to run outdoors and get some work done as the farm, gardens, and summer try to get away from me. My mother has been here for the past two weeks and so I've been gradually reintroducing myself to the animals. In the past week, I've been feeding him and rocking him back to sleep and then handing him to his grandmother for a couple hours while I commune with my four legged flock. 

It feels good to be moving my body again. I know that these days with a newborn are the most precious and that I should feel most guilty about leaving him in the mornings while I run off to the life I had before him. BUT 1) I do feel quite guilty 2) I love watching him sleep and I love napping with his warm body on my chest 3) I also love running through the woods with my goats carrying nothing but a bucket of feed. 

I'm working on this balance of being a still mother with the babe and becoming a functioning member of the farm again. I keep finding my limits. After a day of tending to the gardens and the fields and nursing I was so dehydrated that I had to sleep through dinner. And then I was so hungry that both Leland and I pitched an evening fit. Two days ago I was bringing the goats back to pasture when Hawkeye scared them into running the opposite direction, I started to take after them out of instinct at a sprint but two paces had me bent over holding my crotch and leaking breasts.

And speaking of, its time to feed that sweet child of mine. Signing off. Hope to be back here again soon. 

July 16th

Our son has arrived. I went into labor last Monday at dawn. He was born 36 hours later; Tuesday evening. He was born at the hospital, not at home as we planned. But he arrived in blessedly good health and without the use of any drugs or interventions. 

We have named him Leland. Which means he of the meadowland,  which I think is rather apt.

He is so achingly sweet and we are so devastatingly humbled by our love for him.

Yet another win for pasture-based farms

The small-farm-warrior, big-city-writer Mark Bittman wrote yesterday in the Times about the newly released disturbing (and unsurprising) results of a study conducted a couple of years ago in North Carolina on hog farms. North Carolina is the second biggest pork producing state in the US (Iowa being no. 1). The study wanted to determine and compare the existence of MRSA and MDRSA in workers at confinement hog farms and workers at pasture-based farms. Nick and I were two of those studied representing workers on the latter. Our noses were swabbed and we answered some very detailed questions about our sanitation efforts when dealing with livestock. From the above photo I think you can see, we would get quite close to our pigs. In fact this photo is from hours after a sow had farrowed in the stables adjacent to our home. Nick and I had a slow afternoon on the farm and sat there, at her rear watching each baby piglet slip out, gain near immediate control of their legs and make their way around to the large display of milky teats. 

Pigs that live in confinement (literal concrete slabs, and sometimes cages for sows) receive routine prophylactic antibiotics to keep them alive when their living conditions and feed would otherwise kill them. Prophylactic treatment is preventative. The antibiotics are given assuming that the pig will get sick. Otherwise you could treat pigs therapeutically after an animal shows signs of sickness.

When hogs are treated prophylactically they can develop a strain of bacteria resistant to the antibiotics administered. This bacteria is commonly known as MRSA.   The study shows that workers at these confinement farms are more likely than workers at pasture-based farms to carry this drug resistant bacteria. Typically antibiotics are administered therapeutically or not at all on pasture-based farms.

Bittman writes a much more cohesive overview of this study as did Maryn Mckenna for Wired last week. I recommend reading both.

It is scary stuff. The pigs we grow in the most inhumane conditions we can fathom get sick from their living conditions. We pump them full of antibiotics to keep them from dying. We do this so often that the pigs become hosts to MRSA and it appears from this study that MRSA is then passed on to farm workers from close contact with the pigs. If the workers have it, its only a matter of time before they pass it onto their household members. And then that shit spreads. Very hollywood.

Just another reason to stop supporting factory farms. Start supporting farms where the workers can kiss a pig on the nose without fear of a staph infection.

Any day

With every moment, or chore, or step I wonder if it is the last thing I do before labor starts. I obsess about it. I'm into my 38th week of pregnancy and while statistics tell me my first child will be "late" I want him to come now. My body is no longer my own.  I am really exhausted most of the day though am wired through the night. I cannot lift much more than a goat pail, the cow milk pail is too heavy now, as it strains the muscles in my abandoned abdomen. I'm feeling exponentially more useless on the farm as each day passes. 

Yesterday, while I was pulling maggots out of the ears, eyes, and back of a very sick pig, I wondered....maybe now? Or this morning when I was crouched at mouth level feeding said pig a banana comically laden with tylenol, I thought now?  Maybe it would be at 9 o'clock at night, as the evening thunderstorms rolled through...before we had eaten dinner...when I was left home with the dogs as Fiona and Nick had dashed out to form a makeshift tarp tent over Vangogh's ailing body. 

I thought it could be when Nick arose from the basement to declare that maggots had overtaken several wheels of cheddar. (Maggots are a sick and very real part of life in this humidity and rain.) I thought, my water might break as he threw the infested wheels to the chicken compost. 

Or perhaps it will be something much more mundane, like fencing sheep. Or slicing potatoes for breakfast. Or boiling the cheesecloth. Or buying strawberries at market tomorrow. Or while checking on the hatching chicks.

Or something more bucolic like a swim in the pond, or a walk through the woods with the goats. 

But much more likely, I'll be sleeping, or doing some disgusting chore that involves animal poop, or spoiled milk, or maggots. 

I am a bundle of anticipation. Soon, when he's ready,  it will start and I'll enter into the club of women who've given birth...of women who become mothers. Then I'll understand how mothers can love something more than they love their dog. Then I'll stop comparing a woman's story of her infant daughter to a similar thing that a piglet or a lamb or a calf had just done here.  I will understand then how being pregnant, and laboring, giving birth, and becoming a parent is not something that makes me exceptional but rather allows for me to more fully experience being human with billions of others. 

For now, all I know are the facts that any day soon I will have a baby and my life will change. The how, where, when of it all is left up to the heavens. 

pictured, not pictured

I haven't had the baby yet. I hope I'm not misleading anyone into thinking I have by the silence on this site. Just in the throes of summer. A very rainy rainy summer. Also, just generally massively pregnant and uncomfortable.

So, because there is much to do and because sitting has become unearthly weird and sore for me, I will give you the farm update in the traditionally more succinct pictured, not pictured.

Pictured: 
1. Fiona and Nick and I made a belly/boob cast of my pregnant self. The babe kicked the entire time....so it has its lumps. It is hanging on the mantel. I imagine it won't be long until the puppy jumps up and destroys it. Must find a safer place.
2. The sheep were shorn yesterday. When they were shorn in October they looked like the tiniest little girls. I was expecting the same last night, but they are fat and lumpy. Its incredible what grass can do with a growing body. They will be bred in the fall and hopefully shed some of this summer weight making little lambs over winter.
3. The milking crew. Chickadee in the foreground. Winnie as caboose. The doelings are in training for next year when they are in milk. So, they come in every night with Chickadee. Nobody needs leadlines anymore. They know the drill. We are insulting them by implying otherwise.
4. Hawkeye. Successfully helped in herding sheep once this week. Successfully helped herding goats once this week. Unsuccessfully helped in herding both about 86 times. He's learning, we try not to dwell on the failures.

Unpictured: 
1. The chickens have been moved to the northern pasture across the brook. We miss them only a little and are thoroughly enjoying the new peace of the front porch and garden.
2. The pigs, living off milk and milk by products (whey, buttermilk, skim). They emerge from their forest pen only for food, like two small black dinosaurs. First you see the foliage on top move from the rumblings below...then you hear their grunts...then they come, spilling out of the underbrush and dive into their milk bowls.
3. The rain. The rain. The rain. Fucking Vermont.
4. My surprisingly suburban obsession with lawn mowing. It is my only real sweat exercise lately as running and biking weigh too heavily on my bladder and most farm chores involve carrying things too heavy for my long-ago disappeared abdomen. It is the most fuel intensive workout I've ever come up with but I'll be damned if I don't feel high on endorphins and a neat lawn afterwards.
5. The definition of "lawn" gets a little hazy with 30 acres of open grass.
6. Fiona is in Colorado for a wedding this weekend. We both sank deeply into a despair yesterday when she left.
7. Despite feeling a little short on help we are looking forward to what is most likely the last weekend of just Nick and Kate. Dump run, flea market, bluegrass festival, in bed by 8:30pm. The possibilities are limitless.
8. The anticipation of labor. I've been reading as many inspiring home-birth stories that I can find. I've replaced all bathroom reading with Ina May Gaskin books, imposing my reading list on the entire household. I just wish I could know when it was going to start and have the smallest idea of what it was going to feel like.
9. The kindest care packages for the little babe arriving from friends and blog readers alike. The thoughtfulness makes my belly swell with excitement and love.
10. The very beginnings of musing about a bed & breakfast here on the farm. While our house is quite small, there is another cabin in the woods on our property. It has two big bedrooms and two bathrooms, a wood stove. A great wrap around porch. It is occupied with renters until September, but after that we aren't sure what to do with it. I (naively) think I would love to run a B&B and (naively) think we'd have full occupancy all year round.
11. The way a fellow very tired farmer friend, Alex, signed off an email to Nick and I last week. "Miss you both. Anxiously waiting for winter."